Banks full

Temperature set to perfection

Updated phones

Fast internet

Rich, delicious food

Delivered home

Faux pristine for your pleasure

Or preserved for vacations

Energy on tap

Every wish granted

But with the genie

More unleashed

A planet dying

Choked

Hands bloodied

With each individual share

Of 54000 killed

At the bloody altar

of the God of Convenience

Little bits of everything

Tiny atoms

Negligible figments of almost imagination

Plants, rocks, or water

Or birds, or air,

Or one of many millions of things

— sentient, simple, complex, living, or inanimate —

Become us

Then un-become.

We think of life, death, time spent on the planet

We think

And then we don’t.

But we — or those little bits that assembled into us — are forever.

In yet other forms. Other beings. Other possibilities.

Breath, thought, feeling, joy, sorrow, bonds that we form.

These are fleeting.

But we are forever through our zillion parts.

Ever changing, ever there…

A while ago had written this about being indigenous

Yesterday, over a really long, absorbing and amazing conversation with Kalyan Akkipedi of ProtoVillage, I listened to his experiences and learned a lot vicariously.

One major deepening of my thought process was about what had bothered me about “being indigenous”. People claim this on their origin or birth, or that of their parents. That’s a very broken way of looking at belonging. What Kalyan described from his experience of over 10 months living with the tribes across central India, I learned this about what makes one indigenous :

• Self sustenance —…

Oftentimes, the ideas that find a home and live in my head seem much, much bigger than the person I am, and most work in life seem like a massive effort towards catching up with them, and living up to the scale and ideals they represent and suggest in their truest forms.

Rest-in-peaces and prayers

For a bit, memories will hang around

The weird-guy smiles in private thoughts

The name popping up in contexts found

Exaggerated virtues raised on pedestals

Uncomfortable beliefs buried deeper

The thoughts I so want growing up

But of which am just the keeper

Those are what I’d love to see

Be what I continue to live on in

Not my name, or form, framed, forgotten —

the easy bits that need nothing.

Take the thoughts, the fire

Add questions, add fuel, grow it

Take the little seed you find

Ready the forest soil and sow it

I…

The trouble with “conclusive evidence” is a causal sort of way is that it depends on first/early second order effects, or thereabouts.

Human endeavour by and large is unable to account for Nth order impact. I include scientific observations and theories and all our models of a complex world in this as well.

There’s always the risk of being wrong, and “mumbo jumbo”, but we do need a more — there you go — holistic or systems way of thinking of large scale and complex problems without getting boxed into the “conclusive” boxes. Our ability to learn and recreate models will be really slow and the reality changes a lot faster than that.

So let’s not get gated and wait on “knowing” everything.

The world today does realize that a lot of our activity, work, choices in consumption, production are very seriously damaging to us collectively. Indeed these kill millions, are wiping out species, warming the planet and destroying the ecosystem in ways that these negative outcomes will only scale and worsen.

Yet, because each thread is complex and spread out over thousands of little transactions and pieces, with many, many, many people whose livelihoods, earnings, roles in their careers and society depend on the success on that thread on an everyday basis, and who play a very very tiny part in one…

Bezos has donated massive amounts to fight climate change. Many others too have — all with great intent. So many of us are truly, deeply consumed with the issue, and act in many different ways — both small and big — to try and counter this problem-of-our-times.

The issues around inequality and many others are connected. The ecology, the economy, indigenous freedoms and rights, the richness of our commons are all inextricably linked.

The 2 major opposing ideas and directions are that of scarcity and abundance. The economy today is built around the former, and opposed to the ecology.

Our…